You are here

Romantic Circles Blog

We hope you can spend some time with the new site and offer us any feedback you may have. With a database infrastructure undergirded by basic premises of the Semantic Web, the new design offers new ways to explore our expansive content, collected over Romantic Circles’ 17 years. New features include content recommendation, mapping, streaming audio, usage statistics, image galleries and slideshows, and categorized taxonomies that allow users to navigate in customizable ways. On the front page you'll see a slideshow of the newest resources. A sidebar on the left shows media offerings--audio recommendations and a rage could based on the new taxonomy keyword system. In the right sidebar, statistics reveal, for example, the most popular pages searches. A news feed collects blog posts from several relevant blogs (including our own), and a list of CFPs on Romanticism culled and aggregated from U. Penn’s “Calls for Papers” site. Along bottom of the front page is a portal to a brand new section of the site, the Romantic Circles Gallery, edited by Theresa M. Kelley and Richard C. Sha. The Gallery presents fully-curated, high-resolution images from the Romantic era. In addition to the complete collection of images and their metadata, the Gallery offers a number of exhibits curated around a central theme—from representations of the picturesque to depictions of phrenology.

Despite the new look and feel, you’ll find much that’s familiar. A menu at the top of each page links to each of the core sections of the overall Website, Electronic Editions, Romantic Circles Praxis Series volumes, Scholarly Resources, Pedagogical materials. Once you’ve arrived at one of these a resources, or on a page within a resource, you’ll notice on the right sidebar a content recommendation listing other related resources. This recommendation engine makes use of our taxonomy of more than 10,000 unique keywords.

There is much to explore at the new Romantic Circles beyond the brief description here. We hope you will take a little time to dig around the site and to offer us your feedback. Thank you for continuing to collaborate with us to make Romantic Circles a valuable resource for the Romantic studies community.

Main Blog Categories:

Parent Resource:

The Keats-Shelley Association of America has posted a review of a recent staged reading of Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The performance took place on November 18 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in NYC and was hosted by the Red Bull Theater and the Romanticist Research Group of New York University.

Here is an excerpt from the review:

On November 18, 2013 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village, Revelation Readings, in conjunction with Red Bull Theater and the Romanticist Research Group of New York University, presented the first staged reading of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound since 1998. The performance was followed by an informal Q&A with the director, Craig Baldwin, Red Bull artistic director Jesse Berger, Randie Sessler and Omar F. Miranda from the NYU Department of English, and several exhausted cast members who generously remained after the show to discuss the project with the audience. A sold-out crowd of approximately three hundred—apparently comprising both Shelley enthusiasts and theater fans—enjoyed a lively and nuanced performance that was especially impressive given that the cast had only a single rehearsal that same afternoon.

Main Blog Categories:

Parent Resource:

The most recent issue of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is now live at http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu. Included in this issue is a project by Roger Whitson documenting his experience using process-oriented publishing to teach the expansion of middle-class reading and printing in the nineteenth century alongside the discourse of digital media today.

From the intro:

What classroom roles do journal editors have in the digital age? Roger Whitson invited JITP editors Amanda Licastro and Kimon Keramidas into his class on “The Nineteenth-Century Novel” to explore how editors can supplement traditional classroom instruction and investigate the purpose of design and digital publishing in literary period courses. The course involved a history of reading and book-design in the nineteenth century, along with assignments that encouraged students to experience reading and writing in different modalities. Over the course of twenty months this project has resulted in a wide variety of content, both formal and informal. To display that process and those materials, the authors have designed this project in the form of the interactive timeline below, which gives the scope of the project as a whole. Included in the timeline are date markers of specific milestones and events that took place during the process but don’t link to any specific product, links to documents and multimedia elements created in the evolution of that process, and links to the final formal articles published in the journal.

I take distinct pleasure in announcing the inauguration of a much-revised and richer website for the Keats-Shelley Association of America (http://k-saa.org), a site that will lead not just to current information on events relevant to the younger Romantics, but also to programs on an international stage, including the almost weekly series of lectures and readings held by the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome and the upcoming first-ever conference on Keats to be held at the Hampstead house where he wrote so much of his major poetry, which will take place the first weekend of May 2014. We anticipate keeping the website current in terms of such activities, but also as a means of providing quick access to scholarly resources on the internet germane to our interests. We have also instituted a PayPal account accessible from the site, allowing you to join the K-SAA or effortlessly to renew your membership there.

Parent Resource:

It has been twenty years since the publication of Anne K. Mellor’s foundational study Romanticism and Gender (1993). Those twenty years have witnessed a wellspring of scholarship about Romantic-era women writers and a series of excellent critical biographies and anthologies. Nevertheless, much work remains to be done, both in terms of recovering forgotten women writers of the period and in more clearly contextualizing writers who have already been “recovered.” This special issue invites articles that provide new insight into the lives, writings, and cultural contexts of Romantic-era women. We seek to reconsider how we frame women’s lives and writings: what elements of their experiences do we privilege, and what do we ignore? Perhaps more important, what criteria do we employ when we make these determinations? Topics may include (but are not limited to): women and political writing, gender and genre, women and religion, gender and authorial identity, epistolary culture, literary mentorship, re-thinking periodization (Romantic v. Victorian), and re-assessing the canon.

Main Blog Categories:

Parent Resource:

The Shelley-Godwin Archive, launched on October 31, is now live. The new digital resource comprises the manuscripts of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. For the first time ever, the widely scattered manuscripts of England’s “first family of writers” are being brought together in digital form online for worldwide use. Visit the site at www.shelleygodwinarchive.org.

Created in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the MITH at the University of Maryland, the Shelley-Godwin Archive makes manuscripts and early editions of works by these four key writers of British Romantic literature freely available to the public online. They will enable scholars to study, annotate, and manipulate manuscripts in ways that they could never do with paper or single images. Bringing all four writers together, it will allow scholars to unite the critical, historical, and biographical strands of their research. Most of the primary material in the Shelley-Godwin Archive is drawn from The NYPL’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle and the Bodleian's Shelley holdings, the two foremost collections of these materials in the world.

Main Blog Tags:

Main Blog Categories:

Parent Resource:

We invite proposals for an international Romanticism conference, to be
held at the University of Tokyo on June 13–15, 2014. This event will
bring together four scholarly societies from three continents: it is a
supernumerary conference of the North American Society for the Study
of Romanticism (NASSR), also supported by the British Association for
Romantic Studies (BARS), the German Society for English Romanticism
(GER), and the Japan Association of English Romanticism (JAER).

Over the last two decades, there has been sustained scholarly interest
in the connections between European Romanticism and the peoples,
cultures, and literatures of the rest of the world. While our approach
will be informed by the legacy of Saidian “Orientalism,” we are
particularly interested in models of intercultural connection which
refine or challenge totalizing models of domination and subordination.
We welcome papers that shed light upon the question of “connection”
from the broadest range of perspectives: imaginative, linguistic,
material, social, sexual, scientific, economic, and political.

Drawing on our location in Tokyo, we will use this conference to
consider the broader task of forging connections between Eastern and
Western literature and scholarship. In a Japanese context, the idea of
interpersonal “connection” (kizuna) takes on a different resonance,
because of its close connection to the project of recovery (saisei)
following the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami. This
conference wishes to explore how such acts of cross-cultural
translation offer the possibility of reciprocal transformations of
meaning.

We welcome explorations of the reception of European Romanticism in
Asia and other regions of the world, as well as discussions of the
future status of Romanticism studies in a geographically diverse and
technologically connected scholarly world.

In addition, the site offers information about the Friends, their semi-annual publication The Coleridge Bulletin, and their other Coleridge-oriented programs of interest to both scholars and enthusiasts.